Significant modifications of the Fsairlines System

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Efad
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Posts: 16
Joined: Fri Oct 10, 2008 2:57 am

Significant modifications of the Fsairlines System

Post by Efad » Sat Jun 22, 2019 2:24 am

joefremont wrote:
Tue Jun 11, 2019 6:49 am
Efad wrote:
Mon Jun 10, 2019 7:04 pm
Greetings to all.

Mr. Joe Fremont.

Do not sing victory yet...
ViasaVirtual Airlines, we are preparing a document, in which we will be making our disagreements on this issue of parking fees and maintenance workshops.

Stay tuned...

Erick Aldrighetti
Ceo-VIA003-GTO.
Viasa Virtual.
Well I await with bated breath. As soon as I have something specific I will be happy to respond.

DATE: 06/21/2019. Time: 02:16hlv/18:16utc.
FOR: Administrators Fsairlines. -
FROM: Erick Aldrighetti.
Technical Management of Operations.
CC: Roster Viasa Virtual (4411)
SUBJECT: Significant modifications of the Fsairlines System.

First of all, a cordial and fraternal greeting to all the FSAIRLINES team.

By means of the present, I would like to address all of you, with the purpose of manifesting in this way, some of our discrepancies with the new implementations already active in the system, such as the aircraft maintenance workshops, as well as the collection of fee for parking or parking fee's.

It is worth noting that we do not oppose this implementation because they are decisions that you as administrators have the right to make, but we also believe that; we have so much right to disagree and to express it in order that our opinion about the Fsairlines system is well established, since, for almost 11 years, we have paid our membership in this system and it has taken a long time to make significant changes and of importance for those of us who like to simulate real commercial air activity. We have stayed with you because until now we had not achieved a system in which we could have total control of all the aspects inherent to the administration and operation of an airline, an issue that your Fsairlines system does not provide us with complete satisfaction, but , is one of the closest ones.
We have been analyzing and testing other airline management systems and it seems that many of the developers or programmers still think that it is a game and not a simulator, and maybe they think that we only play simulation and not that we really assume a real simulation, it seems who do not know the paramount importance of performing a rigorous flight clearance of an aircraft.

Mr. Fremont, we will begin with the most recent modifications or inclusions or expansions or system updates:

1.About the Aeronautical Maintenance workshops and maintenance periods or cycles.

Bright idea, but highly stressful for all those who administer the fleets of our airline, the system assumes with strict rigor the lapses corresponding to the maintenance and leave without effect, the maintenance schedule established by the airline, that is, our independence, corporate or business criteria and security, leaves without effect what is established in our basic operations manual, Fsairlines assuming all the activity and leaving us practically with our hands tied.

Most airlines, in real life, have their Maintenance Workshop and if not, of course, they hire one or two workshops to perform maintenance at different stages and these stages are very well determined in our maintenance manual and they are described and carried out as follows:

I. Online Maintenance

1) Not scheduled; Proceed as soon as a fault has been found.

2) Scheduled. It is executed following a program of revision and replacement of regulated and concrete parts. Its purpose is to maintain the certificate of airworthiness of aircraft and to restore the specified level of reliability. The tasks to be performed and the intervals (measured by flight hours performed) in which they must be carried out. The revisions are made in accordance with the original documentation provided by the manufacturers (cell, engine and components), completed with the information provided by other airlines that use the same aircraft and with which they generate the services of the Material Direction of the company. The final maintenance program and any modification thereof must be submitted to the approval of the official verifying body (of, Civil Aviation). The operator is responsible to the agency for compliance with the program.

The scheduled maintenance is divided into 3 categories:
Transit
Daily
Revisions.
Transit maintenance is a quick inspection that must be performed before each flight, including the stopovers. This will check the general condition of the aircraft: possible structural damage, tires, oil, records and access panels, service to the aircraft, etc.

The second is a complete daily review that must be done before the first flight of the day, without exceeding in any case the forty-eight hours. During the same the general state of the airplane is checked, but having additional time to design a corrective action if necessary.

Finally, the review, which includes the previous one, takes place every hundred hours of flight. During the flight, all aspects related to safety around the airplane are checked, specific instructions are developed, possible abnormalities are corrected and a service to the airplane is made, with checking of all the fluid levels necessary for the flight.

II- Minor maintenance, integrated by three other inspections:
Revision A, includes a general inspection of systems, components and structure, both from inside and outside, to verify its integrity.

Revision B, of greater intensity than the previous one, checks the safety of systems, components and structure, together with the service of the airplane and the correction of the elements that so require.

Revision C, is a complete and extensive inspection, by areas, of all interior and exterior areas of the aircraft, including systems, facilities and visible structure.

III - Major Maintenance
Called the Structural Inspection Program ("great stop" in the language of the hangar), the major maintenance is the most thorough and thorough review by which all aircraft have to pass. Involves the participation of 275 specialists who, during a month and a half, will be applied to the accomplishment of different tasks that require sixty thousand hours of activity and the employment of one thousand four hundred tools. The total cost of the operation is around two million Euros, depending on the model of aircraft under inspection.
"Although the rigor of the Fsairlines system is stressful, we cannot deny that it helps a little."

Now, I cannot understand, that the aircraft YV55702 a B747-400 which went into maintenance by a B-Check on May 23, 2019, at a cost of: v$10,390,200 and then said aircraft flew an approximate total of: 17:10 hours, now appears worthless, as we can see in the graph that follows annex:
impossible to upload the image
I can only assume that it is a serious error in the system, since this aircraft has not fulfilled a hundred hours of its last maintenance.

2. About Fee's parking or parking fees.
Initially they seem excessive and we are not very in agreement with the values, but we already imagine that it will not be the only implementation to be carried out in the future by you, surely others will occur to you, that will dynamize the actions to be carried out in the Fsairlines system. In order to keep us occupied by our assets and expenditures, which we see increasing or decreasing, apparently you see that there is a lot of money in our financial balances. Perhaps for you it does not represent much, but for our company, as we have a fleet of 150 aircraft. This implementation will force us to reduce our fleet considerably and move it to smaller airports, in order to reduce as much as possible the expense for this concept.
I must emphasize that the idea is not bad, but the established values, as I indicated previously, we differ from them because we consider them excessive. In addition, they should implement within the same database containing the fuel rates of all airports worldwide, include, annex or integrate parking fees, this could facilitate the management of verification of such expenditures.

3. [In this part I will write to you in the singular since I will do it as Technical Operations Manager of the airline Viasa]
On several occasions I have expressed some discrepancy that we have with the system, Fsairlines, which does not allow us the following:
• We cannot customize or configure our airline.
I explain:
Each airline worldwide have many differences, some of them can be: Fuel policies, National, Regional or Transoceanic operations, carry out or not operations in adverse or restricted weather conditions and / or zero visibility in landings and many more such as: use the same aircraft type, for example: a B737-700; Each B737-700 has a certain configuration, either standard or requested by the buyer and, therefore, their operational weights are very different, not their structural weights, the latter could or could not change significantly since they are implicit in the design.
Unfortunately, with Fsairlines, the only thing that we can modify is the configuration of the number of seats in the passenger cabin, placing it in one, two or three classes, this causes a substantial change in the basic weight of operation and basic operation index, but with the database of Fsairlines, all aircraft B737-700, are standardized, in the basic weight of operation DOW; and in structural weights such as: MTOW; MZFW; MLW, fuel capacity, so each airline can be using a B737-700 with its maximum capacity of 148 passengers and another like us, with a capacity of 136 passengers; It is obvious to see that between these two aircraft, the operating weight or DOW, will necessarily be different, that unfortunately we can not modify it in the FSairlines database since it would affect the whole system and all users because the system does not individualize to each airline, we are practically simulating what is established in Fsairlines.

• We cannot place our rates according to real-life rates, if we do, the system penalizes us by considerably reducing the number of passengers and cargo volumes, since you conceived the system in that way.

• And the most annoying, is with the CLIENT, because it does not read, does not take, does not assume the real ZFW with which we have loaded our airplanes and so perform the calculations with what we are really transporting. I exemplify it:
I think I mentioned it to you, Mr. Fremont, at some time.

After having made a flight from Maiquetía (SVMI) to Maracaibo (SVMC) with a B738, (date: 27-Oct-2018) having booked in the system and informing myself that it should carry 162 passengers and 4,795Kgs of cargo; I decided to only ship the fuel, that is, without passengers and cargo, but nevertheless upon my arrival and after properly closing the Client, the resulting report or pirep was: that I had flown with the passengers and the cargo assigned by the reservation .

This happens, because the client does not read the ZFW that we carry on board, it only reads at the moment of starting the flight if our aircraft exceeds the maximum takeoff weight (MTOW) and at that moment the buttons are activated (change) to suppress the excess weight of passengers, cargo or fuel, that is up to us, and when you touch any of those buttons, the reduction is done automatically and the aircraft is ready, according to the Client, to fly , but if the Client were to read the zero fuel weight (ZFW) actually loaded on the aircraft, that would not happen, for example the case mentioned above. Now, the excellent thing would be that: the client, read, identify both weights, both the MTOW and the real, real ZFW of the moment, this would make Fsairlines a system more adjusted to the realities of simulation that we need and want those who perform a real simulation, and this would avoid the continuous reports of: excess weight when landing, flights with non-configured aircraft as indicated by the reservation or empty flying aircraft and entering money unrealistically to the accounts.

These are some of our observations which we wanted to get to you and the entire development team of the Fsairlines system, only with the aim of overcoming and improving, although it is true that in Viasa we are focused on achieving a system that can provide a real flight simulation operation, a particular configuration of our airline according to our needs and operational characteristics; things that in some other programs like the VAM -Virtual Airlines Manager- has, and that with its Client of name SIMACARS, it reads absolutely the real ZFW with which we load the airplane and all the costs associated with the flight operation are Automatically relate and financial results are more real but, is a system with many bugs, errors that throw in other functions or modules, have yet to perfect it to get to have 100% operational.

No more to reference for the moments, we remain of you, by the board of Viasa Virtual Airlines (4411)

Very truly yours;
Erick Fco. Aldrighetti D.
CEO-VIA003-GTO.

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joefremont
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Re: Significant modifications of the Fsairlines System

Post by joefremont » Sat Jun 22, 2019 6:11 pm

Erick, Thank you for your post and thank you for being FSA members for the last 11 years.

You touched on so many points I thought it was worth making this its own topic.

As with all changes here on FSA its a bit of a balancing act, you have those who want changes to make it more realistic and those who want things simple and don't really want too much change, especially changes that make it more complex for them. Everything here is always a work in progress, we do something, we see how its being used then we adjust.

For now let me respond to a few of your ideas.

Maintenance: Its true we don't really simulate the continuous maintenance that airlines do between every flight, with our A/B/C/D checks tied more to repair percent rather than flight hours or calendar time. We could come up with a system of micro-services, something that fixes small things on a regular basis but does not count as a major/annual service. It would help those who lease aircraft, right now someone leases an AC with the requirement that it must be repaired back to a certain level, they are just below that level but have to pay for the full A-Check even if one has been done a short time before.

In the example you quoted the aircraft that required the B-Check that only had 17:10 is because its repair percent had dropped below 95%, probably because of hard landings, maybe not enough to trigger the hard landing penalty but the higher your vertical speed on touchdown the more damage done to the AC. Basing it purely on hours is hard because not every airline fly's the same way, some do fewer flights with a high multiplier, some more with lower and you have to balance things out.

In a real world airline an aircraft is flown 8+ hours a day, every day of the year. Here is FSA planes are lucky to be flown once a month because VA's have an excess of aircraft compared to those pilots and those pilots are not doing this full time, for many of us this is our hobby and its done when the real world requirements have been satisfied.

Parking: If you find the topic on 'some thought about more realistic' you will see we discussed this at length, in many ways we decided on keeping things simpler to reduce the burden on those administering airlines. We did discuss having rates based on volume of aircraft at an airport, or having some sort of prepaid/reserved parking but many felt those were too complex. Trying to compile a database of actual parking rates from around the world would be a lot of data to collect and in my initial research I did not come across any could source were we could get it from all the many thousands of airports around the world. I am still looking for a reliable database of airports but so far have not found a good one. Currently we do have values in the database for fuel prices and passenger and cargo volumes by country, we could add a parking fee factor by country, but would need some firm basis for coming up with those values.

You mentioned that you may 'reduce our fleet considerably and move it to smaller airports', and to be honest, that was one of the goals of these new fees, there were many one or two person airlines that had hundreds of planes which many felt was not realistic.

Real life rates: Another hard one, in some places the default rate we calculate is higher than the real world rate but often it is lower. Real world rates fluctuate based on competition, fuel prices, government regulations, global and local economies and many things beyond our ability to collect the data. It would be nice if I could model each possible passenger, keeping track of that they want to go from place A to place B and are willing to pay up to a certain amount, which is sort of what we are doing with the new cargo system (which I am getting much closer to finishing) but the volume of data to do that would be overwhelming.

The client: I have started doing some work on the next client. Already I have done some updates for the new cargo system and I am adding a 'reserve fuel' feature where you can specify how much reserve fuel you want and the client not load more payload than the landing weight - reserve fuel will allow. I have done some experiments on reading the payload in the aircraft from the sim and I can do so but am not yet sure what to do with that information. One idea I had was to require the pilot to match the payload in the sim to what is supposed to be loaded, we could reduce the booked payload to match what is in the sim as an option, I do not want to change the payload in the sim as I do not want to take responsibility for the balance of the aircraft. One thing to note is our definition in the database for DOW includes the crew, while the empty weight in the sim does not, we will have to take that into account.

I am sorry if I have not addressed all of your points or come up with concrete changes to address them but am happy to discuss any of them.
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joefremont
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Re: Significant modifications of the Fsairlines System

Post by joefremont » Sat Jun 22, 2019 7:53 pm

I actually have been thinking a lot recently about how to use the actual in sim weight of the aircraft in the client by first idea was force the pilot to adjust the in sim payload to match what FSA thinks it should be, but the idea of adjusting the FSA payload to match what the sim has, has some merit but also complicates the interface and I can't quite get my head around it. What do others think?
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